Hi all,

I still get a bit of traffic here, but as you can see I don’t really post here anymore.

I’m mostly reviewing books over on YouTube and Instagram – links below. Enjoy!

YouTube: Julia’s Book Time

Instagram: Julia Tulloh Harper

A bunch of friends and family have been asking how they can read ‘Broad Hatchet’, my short story from the Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize. The edition that it’s printed in is 224, but you can just read the story and judge’s report online now, for free! Yay. If you really feel like forking out the print edition is available at indie bookstores like Readings, The Paperback, Hill of Content, etc, and also from the Overland website.

The runner-up stories are AWESOME – ‘Acorn of Sadness‘ by Ashleigh Synnott, which started off in quite a humorous tone, took me to a dark and upsetting place that I was in no way expecting. I still feel weird and disturbed, three days after reading it (in a good way). Ben Walter’s ‘All Hollows‘ is beautifully written, also darkly comic, and focuses on the existential crises / insomnia of three trick-or-treaters (or real monsters – can’t tell!).

The rest of the journal is cracking, too, as always.

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This is a really beautiful book. It’s a slow burn, and the story is not so much plot driven as it is an extended and poetic meditation on origins, both in terms of family (ie. what we inherit from our parents, whether we can escape their influence or not), but also our evolutionary biological origins as humans – and the origins of life or existence itself. The Salamanders is published by Transit Lounge (who also published Black Rock White City by A.S. Patrić, winner of this year’s Miles Franklin) so it was no surprise to find the writing was of high quality.

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Oh, what a lovely book. I picked this new release up while I was in in Scotland last month – it’s written by a Scottish musician and was released through a local press. Darkly comic, coarse, and witty, the story is told by John, a young Scot who feels listless after attending art school in London; he returns to the Scottish countryside just outside St Andrews to stay with his old pal Stevie who works on a local farm. It’s primarily a story about the lads’ friendship – getting over the initial awkwardness, learning to be pals again after years apart- but also about belonging somewhere, or trying to belong somewhere, and trying not to disappoint people, or places.
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Um…opened up my email this morning to find I had been announced the winner of the Overland VU Short Story Prize, after finding out two weeks ago that I had been shortlisted! I can’t really believe it, but what an incredible honour. Overland is such a wonderful journal. And also – big thanks to the judges AND to Overland and Victoria University for supporting emerging writers! So very encouraging.  My story, ‘Broad Hatchet’, along with the full judges’ report and two stories by the runners up, will appear in the next edition of Overland, which comes out in about two weeks. I also get $6000 prize money (like WUT?!?!). Goes to show how dedicated these organisations are to supporting writers in their work.

The judges said: ‘Broad hatchet’ takes the classic Australian short story – pioneer mythology, man versus landscape – and reshapes it…[it’s] ‘intimate, subversive and finely wrought’. I’m pretty gobsmacked by their kind words.

Congrats too to runners up Ben Walter and Ashleigh Synnott – can’t wait to read their stories, which will also appear in the September Overland.

And of course special thanks to my babes Alexis Drevikovsky, Ash Hanson, Stu Harper, Elanna Nolan and Meaghan Young for all their feedback on early drafts of the story 🙂

I was so totally stoked to find out my short story, ‘Broad Hatchet’, about a chick who builds a cabin in the Australian bush (or at least tries to), has been shortlisted for the Overland VU Short Story Prize from 500 entries. Overland is one of my favourite Australian political and cultural journals so I feel pretty honoured.  Winners announced in a couple of weeks – fingers crossed! The other shortlisted stories sound great so I look forward to reading the winning tale.

This book is unsettling and upsetting – in a good way. It basically traces the workings of a young woman called Joy’s mind after her partner dies suddenly. Her grief quickly becomes extreme depression (and perhaps psychosis, though it’s not made clear), and she also struggles with alcoholism and social anxiety. We don’t learn a whole lot about her partner’s death (just enough to understand that it happened and was traumatic for Joy, narrated through brief and disjointed italicised flashbacks) and so the focus really is on the inner workings of Joy’s mind.
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This book was good fun. Set in the 1920s, it follows Evie, a young American woman who wants to the first female obstetrician in the US in a time where girls even attending uni was frowned upon, let alone becoming doctors, let alone doctors that helped women give birth. The story traces her attempts to get in med school in NYC, and then to pay for med school once she’s in – she does this by becoming a showgirl with the Ziegfied Follies (another so called ‘scandalous’ choice that she strives to keep hidden lest she be expelled from university). At the same time a romance is brewing – Evie is falling in love with Thomas Whitman, a rich banker dude who is super nice and cool, but he keeps travelling abroad for business, and Evie is worried that because he’s such a high flyer, his relationship with her (and her associated scandals) could compromise his family business, etc etc…
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